What’s surprising to me about this last study is that stroking mice with gloved fingers was more effective than stroking them with a paintbrush, even though gloves can have a rather ‘rubbery’ feel you’d think would pull on their fur. Wonder how this compares to real allo-grooming?

I’m at Aarhus University’s research centre in Foulum right now, for Britt Henriksen’s defence. It was a very nice day, which made up for the hideous 15 hour journey (the nadir being 8 hours on a packed plane, stuck in the seat next to a loo that was horribly heavily visited all night due to several cases of food poisoning). (This reminds me: last time I visited Foulum I swore I never would again! Oops).

Britt worked with Steen Moller to refine the Welfare-Quality-based ‘Welfur‘ on farm assessment protocol, trying to work out if any of the planned assessment periods can be cut (possibly winter, since the after effects of restricted feeding then show up during the breeding season), and the extent to which it matters when in the breeding season a farm is assessed (it matters, unfortunately). She also did some qualitative work asking farmers about their experiences swapping ideas at so-called “stable schools”.

She did a very good job in the defence, and as always, it was nice see the student gradually relaxing as they realize they really did think hard about every decision over the previous 3 years. In Britt’s case this meant she gradually moved from standing rather rigidly behind the desk, to moving in front of the desk to be closer to us, and finally sitting on the desk smiling and waving her hands at us. Here she is at the end, with me and her other examiner, IRTA (Spain)’s Antonio Verlade, and below that, receiving one of a big pile of presents during the reception afterwards (here from Bente Krogh Hansen, with Jens Malmkvist in the background).

Maria did a 14 hour road trip over Thursday and Friday to pick our next batch of mink up from Wisconsin. These were 128 young male Pastels, donated by a farm to support our cage size project.

As well as donating the animals, these farmers really helped Maria finetune the trip: “They made new transport cages for us as they thought the trailer was gonna be bad, they had prepared giant ice cubes for the trip to have on top of water, and they made a sort of cover so that it’d be darker in there for the mink while still having air flow, etc. They were super nice and sensible, really caring for their animals, very interested in research and overall amazing!”

On the truck:

In their new homes (either a Canadian [e.g. 6] or Danish size [e.g. 5] cage):

Last week I spent five days in Boston again (well, a conference centre in Newton; I still have no real idea what Boston is like) at the Charles River Short Course– an extension meeting for animal techs and lab animal vets to get continuing education.

Most fun was spending time with Joe Garner, Cheryl Meehan, Brianna Gaskill (“Grannyyyyyyy!!!!”) and San Diego Zoo’s Greg Vicino. Joe and I are designing an experiment to see if ‘roughened’ enrichments (e.g. running wheels lined with sandpaper) would reduce nail length in mice, which in turn might reduce the harmful self-scratching that causes ulcerative dermatitis. So it was fun to plot about that. And Brianna has two students of her own now (both masters: Amy Robinson-Junker, looking at the effect of enrichment and tech disturbance on sleep [the project I wanted Elke to do!], and Megan LaFollette, studying rat tickling and the human-animal bond). That makes me a great-grandmother!

I also went on the facility tour this time. Interesting, but it mainly just made me sad. A warehouse-like room was full of isolators stacked floor to ceiling (almost Matrix-like), housing some 300 000 rodents. Bad enough seeing the tiny cages with negligible enrichment, but all made much worse knowing what a very flawed process science is.